Networks have grown considerably over the years making it difficult to keep network drawings up to date. Generally, it could take days and sometimes weeks to create a network drawing manually for a large enterprise network. The network engineer must connect to all network devices, pull many tables of data, manually parse the data and use a drawing program to create the network drawing. During the process, the network engineer will need to create the best layout for the drawings which includes the decisions on where to place each device, how to represent each device, how to connect each device, etc. And, if the network engineer changes his mind through the process, he will need to run through the entire process again. This requires a great deal of time. Also, the drawing is immediately outdated as soon as network devices are added, removed or reconfigured. Another problem is the lack of skill in creating the drawing. Most network engineers spend much time in fixing problems and left with little or no time for creating drawings. Thus, the skill is never taught to anyone. Sometimes network consultants are called-in to support a network that they did not design or implement. The network consultant further needs to identify the devices, connections between the devices and create a network drawing before they could provide support.
Automated network drawings have been available for years. For many years products have relied primarily on SNMP to collect data from network devices. SNMP uses UDP (user datagram protocol), a connectionless protocol that is not as reliable as a connection-oriented protocol. SNMP commands were also non-intuitive and difficult to use. Existing systems create physical drawings or physio-logical drawings. Further, logical drawings were not created, and even if they were created, there was no distinction between physical (layer 2) and logical (layer 3) devices or connections.
Therefore, there is a need for an apparatus and method to dynamically discover networked devices to create physical and logical network topology maps. Further, there is a need for an apparatus that implements Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), a connection-oriented protocol for more efficient and reliable data collection. Further, there is need for an apparatus that creates a unique visualization of networks implementing network driven hierarchical virtual physical (vPhysical) and virtual logical (vLogical) formats.